IP Carrier

The European Commission argues that by tying use of the Android OS and Google Play to a phone supplier's offering of Google's search engine and browser, Google quashed potential competition. 

But many would argue Android is not a monopoly. There are other choices, aside from Android and the iPhone OS. But few end users or phone manufacturers have chosen to use those alternatives. Tying or bundling always raises issues, though. 


source: Statista

Executives at AT&T seem certain that new video screens are going to emerge as passengers start spending more time in autonomous vehicles. The argument is that if people are riding, but not required to drive, then video viewing time might well increase beyond present levels.
The biggest potential changes might come from people with long commutes, though even users of autonomous or even ridesharing vehicles for shorter trips around town would logically become potential new audiences.
Consumer behavior still is a barrier for subscription-based or pay-per-view approaches. Consider an airliner a ridesharing vehicle. How many passengers do you notice buying a video entertainment service during the flight? Not many.
Ad-supported content obviously will have a bigger potential audience, and especially for ridesharing services, rather than auto owners. The immediate problem is that the economics of substituting ridesharing for auto ownership, in most parts of the United States, do not exist.
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As much as connectivity is untethered and mobile; as important as internet apps now are in the mobile value proposition; as much as consumers keep increasing their data consumption, we tend to vastly underestimate consumer behavior as a moderating influence on mobile data consumption.
An analysis of mobile tariffs and mobile data consumption by Tefficient found only a weak correlation between average revenue per user and data usage, for example.
That is not what one might expect. The analysis shows that, in most countries, mobile data consumption is 3 Gbytes per month, or less, no matter whether overall recurring charges are high or low.
That seems to fly in the face of both economics and the Tefficient data, which also shows that mobile data prices and usage are directly correlated (high price leads to low usage; low prices lead to high usage). So something else is at work.
source: Tefficient
Among the logical explanations for those findings are that mobile subscriptions represent a b…

Verizon is going to flip mobile network economics upside down as it builds commercial 5G-based fixed wireless capabilities.
Make no mistake, this is a fundamental reworking of assumptions about mobile network cost and retail pricing of mobile data consumption.
The big challenge for firms such as Verizon, which want to build new 5G-derived platforms to supply fixed wireless, is that doing so will fundamentally challenge traditional thinking about the cost of wireless networks.
Fundamentally, network cost will have to be radically lower if the 5G platform, operating in fixed mode, is going to be competitive with fixed network usage and retail prices. Basically, cost per gigabyte has to drop by an order of magnitude (10 times) or more, if any 5G-based network hopes to compete, head to head, with fixed network internet access.
Ironically, the fear that service providers would not be able to afford to build and operate such networks seems to be proving manageable.
In other words, there is re…

With the caveat that the DirecTV and Time Warner acquisitions by AT&T remain controversial in some quarters, the arguments for both remain simple enough: AT&T’s core businesses are shrinking (as is the general trend more broadly in the developed world’s telecom markets) AT&T has to generate new revenues at scale AT&T needs that revenue to generate high free cash flow, to pay its high and growing dividend AT&T has done so historically mostly by acquisition Beyond which, AT&T has to reposition itself as has Comcast, In additional areas of the internet ecosystem
AT&T needs to generate lots of free cash flow to support its dividend payouts, which historically range between 50 percent and 100 percent of free cash flow. That is hard to do on a declining base of revenues, even if AT&T did not have a strategy of constantly raising its dividend over time.

          AT&T Dividend Payout Ratios (Dividends as a Percent of Free Cash Flow) source: Seeking Alpha
Among the…

It is easy to underestimate the impact of commercialized millimeter wave spectrum. Since supply and demand always matters in any market, the sheer amount of millimeter wave spectrum, as well as its cost, is going to enable new business strategies.
The impact will be intensified as well by other related developments (small cells, spectrum sharing, massive multiple-input multiple output radios, better modulation techniques) that will greatly expand spectrum availability and also lead to lower prices for spectrum.
Though it is generally underestimated, millimeter wave spectrum and the other associated technology trends will enable wireless networks--for the first time--to directly challenge fixed networks for internet access customers, with features that are at least as good as fixed networks (and sometimes better), and with retail pricing that also is comparable.
Conversely, that is going to be a key business model challenge for tier-one operators of fixed access networks, which might we…